The New Year's Resolution We Should Be Making

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We all know that popular New Year's resolutions involve dieting,
exercise and the nixing of bad habits. But what if we could fix
things we didn't even know were wrong with us?

Even good people have mental weaknesses. Just ask psychologists,
whose research often turns up sour news on the human psyche. We
can be
jealous and arrogant, willing to
look the other way when horrible things are going on, and
even the nicest of us harbor
subtle racial bias.

In our best New Year's fashion, we asked social scientists to
tell us what they see as the worst hidden weaknesses of humans —
and whether there's anything we can do to overcome them. Their
responses suggest that this year, we should all resolve to see
things from others' perspectives.

We Fear the Other

One unflattering trait we share with many other animals is Fear
of the Other, which is just the flipside of a rather clinging,
excessive and obsessive love of (Just Like) Me. Social
psychologists call this "in-group" bias; cognitive psychologists
see its advantages in fluent, speeded-up processing of the
familiar. We're long used to who we are, and so no real thought
is necessary to deal with ourselves. Thus, in order to preserve
our precious laziness of thought, we heavily invest in
surrounding ourselves with people just like us. We segregate into
neighborhoods and work and leisure environments where any others
closely approximate us in age, race, income, political allegiance
and even sexual orientation or the accepted type of facial hair.

The consequence is that we never get to meet anyone who isn't
like us. This, in turn, leads to failing to imagine any Other,
and to a loss of desire to even consider the Other as someone who
exists, a real human being just like us, except not just like us.
At its most innocent, all this fencing-in creates little upticks
in closed-mindedness inside one person's skull — missed
opportunities for jolts of fun or learning. At its worst, for
instance when manipulated by clever demagogues who realize that
nothing binds us together more than fear of that ultimate other,
the imagined enemy, it leads to the Holocaust, Vietnam, Rwanda,
Darfur, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and so on.

What to do? Go visit. Uncozy yourself. Get a move on. Practice
loving-kindness with someone truly other. (If you're in academia,
maybe take your
Republican-voting pariah colleague out for lunch, and listen
for a change.) Or, at the very least, next time you find yourself
at lunch agreeing with everyone's astute observations, do
realize: "Well, duh."

We've been busting myths about women since the 1960s; it's time
we bust some myths about
men. Single in America, a 2011 national study of singles
based on the U.S. census and conducted by Match.com (and myself),
does this in spades.

This study clearly shows that men are just as eager to marry; 33
percent of both sexes want to say "I do." Moreover, men in every
age group are more eager to have children: 51 percent of men age
21 to 34 want kids, while 46 percent of women in this age range
yearn for offspring. Men are less picky about a partner, too.
Fewer men "must have" or regard it as "very important" to have a
mate of the same ethnic background (20 percent of men versus 29
percent of women); and fewer say they "must have" or regard it as
"very important" to have a partner of the same religion (17
percent of men versus 28 percent of women). And get this:
Men experience love at first sight more often; just as many men
under age 35 believe you can stay married to the same person
forever (84 percent); and in a committed relationship, men are
less likely to want nights out with friends (23 percent versus 35
percent of women); less eager to keep a separate bank account (47
percent versus 66 percent of women); and less keen to take a
vacation on their own (8 percent versus 12 percent).
[ Busted!
6 Gender Myths in the Bedroom and Beyond ]

I study the brain in love. My colleagues and I have put over 80
men and women into a brain scanner (MRI), and we found no gender
differences in romantic passion. This Single in America
study tells it like it is: Men are just as eager to find a
partner, fall in love, commit long term and raise a
family. And the sooner journalists (particularly those
writing for women's magazines), social scientists (particularly
those convinced that men are evil), TV and radio talk-show hosts,
and all the rest of humanity that berates men begin to embrace
these findings, the faster we will find — and keep — the love we
want.

— Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist at Rutgers
University and the chief scientific advisor of Match.com

We go with our gut

The emerging view in psychology is that morality is something we
feel more than think. Rather than reasoning our way to
decide what is right and what is wrong, there is now overwhelming
evidence to suggest that moral evaluations are "gut"
reactions that we justify after the fact with what seem like
principled arguments. This simple truth is the source of both
humankind's most ennobling acts of kindness and some of its
most-callous and malicious misdeeds.

When victims of misfortune are close to us — when we can see and
feel their suffering — we are capable of incredible generosity
and self-sacrifice. When our connection to victims is less
visceral, however, even when we "know" full well of their
suffering in a
cognitive sense, we are often unmoved by their plight and able to
rationalize our inaction. Heinous acts committed by people or
groups whom we love and admire can be excused as necessary or
accidental, just as relatively benign acts of our enemies are
often imbued with evil intent and taken as justification for
retribution. Our tendency to mistake what we feel for what we
think, especially in the realm of moral judgment and
decision-making, plays a central role in intergroup conflict and
moral
hypocrisy, and because the problem lies as much in our guts
as in our minds, it is a challenging weakness to overcome.

My suggestion to friends is to turn the emotional table by
submitting judgments to the "shoe on the other foot test." When
faced with a difficult moral choice, ask yourself how you would
feel and what you would do if a victim of misfortune was your
loved one, or the perpetrator of some morally questionable act
was you.

— Peter Ditto, professor of psychology and social behavior at
the University of California, Irvine

In my view, the most pervasive limitation in people is the
ability to accurately understand the feelings and needs of
others, and to fully appreciate their own impact on other
people.

This ability is typically conceptualized in terms of " empathy," "emotional
intelligence," "social intelligence" or
"interpersonal intelligence," and it clearly varies in
strength from person to person.

While I think that people broadly recognize the value of this
ability for selfish gain (e.g., to be an adept communicator,
or to "charm" others), it also plays a critical role in
caring for others — empathy most certainly does this
in motivating altruistic behavior.

As to what can be done about this limitation? Can we strengthen
our ability to be in tune with others and be less focused on
the self? I think it begins with endeavoring to hold to the
"golden rule" that we should treat others as we wish to
treated, and also by trying to imagine ourselves on the
outside interacting with us — as someone else on
the outside, would like who we are very much? Would we
consider ourselves kind,
compassionate and considerate, or self-centered, selfish
and thoughtless?

In short, always try to put yourself in the other's position
before speaking or acting —sounds rather obvious and simple,
but it turns out to be quite a bit more difficult than one
might think, and I believe a persistent challenge in our
interpersonal relationships, both casual and close, that we
face throughout our emotional and intellectual development.

— Jordan Litman, psychologist at the University of South
Florida

We act out of self-preservation

One of the most disturbing things I have learned about people is
that they are very self-protective, sometimes at the expense of
others. My
research in sexual harassment demonstrates that people will
blame others in a manner that protects their own interests.
People who unconsciously find themselves to be similar to victims
of sexual harassment will assign a relatively stronger level of
blame to sexual harassers. This is not particularly disturbing;
what is disturbing is that people who unconsciously find
themselves to be similar to sexual harassers tend to let people
off the hook for sexual harassment and even go so far to blame
the victims of the harassment. They seem to kick these people
(typically women) when they are down. This added insult to injury
compounds the negative psychological effects of harassment.

Furthermore, the reason for blaming victims of harassment may
relate to the same reason they harass in the first place — an
inability to see the perspective of others. Harassers and those
similar to harassers cannot really see the world from the
perspective of other people. They find their own behavior to be
normal, acceptable in part because they simply cannot or refuse
to see what it does to other people. If you were to boil this
message down to a
New Year's resolution, I would say to always try to put
yourself in someone else's shoes before you do something stupid.
It's amazing what people will do without considering others'
feelings.

— Colin Key, professor of psychology at the University of
Tennessee, Martin